LCC R3: Adams wins and Carlsen narrowly escapes Kramnik

12/3/2012 – It was hardly the start anyone expected as Magnus Carlsen got himself into trouble early on in his game against Vladimir Kramnik. It took all his exemplary technique to save the game, and stay on course for the record. Michael Adams was the local hero after he defeated Judit Polgar, and Nakamura was the last to finish as he tried his utmost to beat Jones. Illustrated report with analysis and pictures.

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The 2012 London Chess Classic is taking place in the Olympia
Conference Centre from Saturday, December 1st until Monday, December 10th.
Games start each day in general at 14:00h London time, except for round four
(16:00h) and the final round (12:00h). Time controls are classical forty moves
in two hours, then twenty moves in one hour and thirty minutes for the rest
of the game. A win is counted as three points, a draw as one, and a loss zero.
Tiebreaks: 1) number of wins, 2) number of wins with black, 3) result of the
individual game between the tied players. In the unlikely event that there is
still a tie then: 4) 2 x 15'+2" games, and if necessary 5) Armageddon game:
6'+2" vs 5'+2" with draw odds for black. If there is a tie involving
more than two players then the Rapid games will be conducted as a double round
all play all.

Round three

By Alejandro Ramirez

Round
3: Monday, Dec. 3rd, 2012, 14:00h

Levon Aronian

½-½

Vishy Anand

Vladimir Kramnik

½-½

Magnus Carlsen

Gawain Jones

½-½

Hikaru Nakamura

Michael Adams

1-0

Judit Polgar

Luke McShane (bye) – assisting
commentary

It is unclear what exactly is causing it – it might be the soccer scoring system, it might be the players invited, it might even be that one player has a day off every round and the standings are then not completely clear. Whatever the reason, London has started out with a bang and we have seen three very exciting rounds. Though today for the first time the amount of draws was greater than the amount of decisive games, I don’t believe any spectator was unhappy with the games.

As is traditional, one of the official dignitaries makes the first move to start the round:
in this case, 8-year-old FIDE Candidate Master Joshua Altman (ENG) played 1. Nf3
and whispered, "To avoid Magnus' Grunfeld!"

Vishy Anand had a very promising position against...

...Levon Aronian, but was unable to capsize the Armenian vessel.

Aronian – Anand ½-½ : Levon is another player that has had a very rocky start. This game went little better, as his opening was very questionable and basically caused him to be down a pawn from the beginning. However he was at least able to pull himself together and scrape a draw, albeit hardly the way anyone wants to play with White.

The ever popular Judit Polgar suffered at the hands of...

...top Brit Michael Adams, who seems intent on being the local hero of the tournament.

Adams – Polgar 1-0: Judit hasn’t been playing her best in this event. She got into problems straight from the start after allowing White to establish a wonderful passed pawn on the d-file. She was never able to recover or cause serious problems and Adams picked up an easy point.

Game of the Day (Adams-Polgar) by Andrew Martin

Hikaru Nakamura was also anxious to bounce back from yesterday's mishap, and
did his utmost to ground down Gawain Jones in the endgame. They drew in the end.

Jones-Nakamura ½ - ½: After White got next to nothing in a Gruenfeld, Nakamura was able to liquidate into a Knight vs. Bishop endgame in which only he had any chances of winning. However Jones showed that he can defend these positions even against the top in the world, and a draw was eventually agreed after much suffering from White.

Vladimir Kramnik came incredibly close to defeating Magnus Carlsen but was not able
to muscle his way in the endgame, despite an extra pawn.

Kramnik-Carlsen ½ - ½: Of course this is the spectator’s game of choice – the tournament leaders facing each other! A relatively dull opening allowed Kramnik to gain some pressure against an isolated b-pawn, which eventually fell. However the victory was still not in sight as there were no passed pawns or any clear targets, and the simplification of the queenside pawns didn’t help White any. It’s hard to pinpoint where Kramnik missed a better chance to create problems. Maybe 28. Rc1 instead of 28. e4? Carlsen suffered, but the draw was held.

A special mention should be made of Kramnik’s Live Rating, since most are understandably focusing on Carlsen’s dash for the record. Back when the published ratings were changed from five-point increments to display single digit differences, a great many criticisms were leveraged, describing it as silly, and unnecessarily precise. Today, had Vladimir Kramnik won his game against Magnus Carlsen, he would have hopped past Levon Aronian to world number two, however his draw meant remaining in third place, with a whopping difference of… 0.1 Elo.

Local fan Trevor Jones is rejoined by one of his heros, Vladimir Kramnik

The games – except for rounds four and nine – start at 2 p.m.
or 14:00h British time = 15:00h CET, 17:00h Moscow, 7:30 p.m. Chennai, 22:00h
Beijing, 01:00 a.m. Melbourne, 03:00 a.m. Auckland, 6 a.m. San José,
9 a.m. New York. You can check your location here.
Naturally the games will be covered live on the official web site (below) and
on Playchess. The games of round four begin two hours later, those of the final
round two hours earlier.

Links

The games will be broadcast live on the official
web site and on the chess server Playchess.com.
If you are not a member you can download a free Playchess client and get
immediate access. Or you can get our latest Fritz
13 program, which includes six months free premium membership to Playchess.

See also

12/30/2017 – The "King Salman World Blitz & Rapid Championships 2017" in Riyadh from Decemer 26th to 30th. At the half way point of the Blitz Championship, the defending champ Sergey Karjakin leads with 9 / 11. Maxime Vachier-Lagrave is a half point back followed by Peter Svidler and a trio of Chinese: Wang, Ding and Yu on 8 / 11. In the Women's Pia Cramling has a full point lead with 9½ / 11. Watch live with Rounds 11 to 22 from 12:00 Noon CET (6:00 AM EST) on Saturday with commentary by E. Miroshnichenko & WGM K. Tsatsalashvili.

See also

12/6/2017 – Imagine this: you tell a computer system how the pieces move — nothing more. Then you tell it to learn to play the game. And a day later — yes, just 24 hours — it has figured it out to the level that beats the strongest programs in the world convincingly! DeepMind, the company that recently created the strongest Go program in the world, turned its attention to chess, and came up with this spectacular result.

Video

On this 60 mins video we are going to concentrate on a simple, very solid idea in the main line Scandinavian, which even Magnus Carlsen has used to win games. Black focusses on making his life easy in the opening and forces White to work very hard to get advantage – but it is doubtful if White can get an advantage. Club players are always on the lookout for effective, time-saving solutions and here we have just that. Accompany FIDE Senior Trainer and IM Andrew Martin on this 60 mins video. You can learn a new opening system in 60 mins and start to play it with confidence on the very same day!